“Kids learn on the Internet in a self-directed way, by looking around for information they are interested in, or connecting with others who can help them. This is a big departure from how they are asked to learn in most schools, where the teacher is the expert and there is a fixed set of content to master.”

new challenges in how to manage their visibility and social relationships online

Online media, messages, and profiles that young people post can travel beyond expected audiences and are often difficult to eradicate after the fact

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they're choosing books like 13-year-old girls -- or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

two-thirds of freshmen identify themselves as "middle of the road" or "conservative." Such people aren't likely to stay up late at night arguing about Mary Daly's "Gyn/Ecology" or even Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

"I have stood before classes," he tells me, "and seen the students snicker when I said that Melville died poor because he couldn't sell books. 'Then why are we reading him if he wasn't popular?' "

All too often education actually acts as a form of aversion therapy, that what we're really teaching our children is to associate learning with work and to associate work with drudgery so that the remainder of their lives they will possibly never go near a book because they associate books with learning, learning with work and work with drudgery. Whereas after a hard day's toil, instead of relaxing with a book they'll be much more likely to sit down in front of an undemanding soap opera because this is obviously teaching them nothing, so it is not learning, so it is not work, it is not drudgery, so it must be pleasure. And I think that that is the kind of circuitry that we tend to have imprinted on us because of the education process. Bingo. Such a tidy summary of the Business Roundtable vision of education as preparing workers for the workforce.

To me “sound pedagogy” isn’t a guarded gateway through which all things must pass before becoming true learning, it’s an ideal that should permeate and inform everything.

the perpetual conflict between the educational technology unit and the learning and teaching unit

The educational technologist are seen to be tech-obsessed, light on pedagogy and prone to obscure abbreviations; while the academics are stereotyped as waffley anti-technologists with a love of chalk-and-talk. Adding to this complexity, each sphere tends to be characterised by a distinct culture and common language. Often times the divisions are so clearly delineated that, despite units merging on paper, the two spheres operate largely independently of one another.

"Most jobs require computers," noted Brittnee Stephen, 16, as she assembled a slideshow on her HP Mini laptop. "It's good that we're learning it now."

has just begun incorporating technology

students seem far more interested in learning via interactive technology than they had been with a chalkboard and an overhead projector

The web opens up an array of options for teaching, learning, and connecting, but we need to remember that learning should be organized around the needs of the student/learner. The cost of joining a website should not be complete loss of control over your content, and as technology advocates we need to become more aware of the ramifications of data control and data portability within networked learning environments. In short, learners deserve better than the terms offered at StudyBlue, Facebook, Ning, etc. Why should a prerequisite of social learning be the loss of control over how your work is used/reused? By promoting sites that are predicated on an intellectual land grab of learner-created content, we perpetuate the lie that this is acceptable behavior.

Although economic downturns tend to push more students to enroll in online education programs, enrollment in University Without Walls remains well shy of where it would need to be for the program to break even

The Skidmore Faculty Senate will vote at the end of February on whether to recommend to the Board of Trustees that the program be phased out. The board is expected to make the final decision when it convenes in May.

students must “read for knowledge and write with the goal of exploring ideas.” This informal mission statement, along with special seminars for freshmen, is intended to help “re-teach students about what education is.”

if students developed a genuine interest in their field, grades would take a back seat, and holistic and intrinsically motivated learning could take place

rigid disciplinary boundaries.

alternative assignments involve writing and, "Why should she get punished for not going to the movie?"

social repercussions for a student whose parents refuse to give permission to watch a film in class.

(There is a rich - if unexpected - source of inspiration for this kind of collaborative space in the history of the 19th century mutual improvement societies, reading clubs and other self-organised, working class institutions. For example, the church halls and upstairs rooms of pubs where many of them met are still common enough - and would be worth exploring as possible venues for a group trying to set up such a space today.)